Showing all posts in March 2017

Have you ever talked with someone about a problem that they have, and they’re asking for your advice and opinions and every time you make a suggestion they respond with something like, “Yeah, but it wouldn’t work and here are all the reasons why”? And you can “yeah, but” anything- “Yeah, but I tried that and my situation stayed the same.” “Yeah, but she won’t listen to me anyway.” “Yeah, but that would require me to change everything I’m doing.” “Yeah, but if I did that then I would have to go back and fix a million other things that I’ve left unaddressed.”

After a while, it starts to seem like the person whose problem your listening to isn’t really looking for a solution. In fact, it might even start to seem like they’re committed to feeling bad and frustrated and to the problem itself. You get impatient and say something like, “Well, are you going to shoot down everything I suggest?” or “I don’t know what the answer is.” And they say something about how they don’t mean to be contrary and then start the cycle all over again. It almost feels like an argument, and they’re trying to convince you of all the reasons their life will always suck.

Most of us have been on either side of this conversation and understand that both of these roles are frustrating. When we’re the ones acting as the sounding board, we feel like the other person just wants to complain. When we’re the ones complaining, we feel frustrated that we’re experiencing the problem and scared that we will never move through it.

But what’s the deal? What’s happening with this pattern? And what can we do to make it productive instead of self-defeating?

What’s happening with this pattern is that we are arguing for our problem or our limitations. We’re defending them. (That feeling you had about your friend seeming pretty committed to their problem is right on. They are.) We have a lot of reasons to argue for our limitations. Most of them have to do with core beliefs we hold and the narratives we tell about the world and who we are in it.

We pick up our core beliefs as we develop. As we experience the world, we make meaning of these experiences and internalize that meaning. Our core beliefs are born of this meaning. If I grew up poor and I experienced this as lack, I might have started to believe that there is not enough. As I continued to develop, I might have cultivated the belief that, “Because I am poor, I cannot have what I want.” This limiting belief might have prevented me from going to college and setting my sights on the kind of life I wanted instead of the life I thought was available to me in my current state of lack. Maybe my narrative turned into “Everyone else can figure out how to have the life they want because they came from money or had some kind of windfall or are not as challenged.”

I might even go to therapy in hopes of enlisting the help of a professional, but end up spending a lot of my time fighting the treatment and arguing for my limitations. (And if I’ve picked a therapist worth their weight they’ll challenge me on this so that I can get out of my own way.)

Defending our problems is a pretty common behavior and while it takes time and work to change it, we can.

Try this exercise:

1) Assess your narrative: What story do you tell about yourself, about who you are in the world? What story do you tell about the world? What story do you tell yourself about your capabilities, limitations, how you respond to challenges, what’s available to you?

2) Assess your current core beliefs: What negative and positive core self-beliefs do you hold?

Next time you’re in an empathic space, explore these questions with yourself. No need to connect your findings to any behavior yet. Just be curious about it. Let yourself sit with what you’ve been telling yourself all these years and hold that with compassion.

“Between the stimulus and the response there is a space, and in this space lies our power and our freedom.”-Victor Frankl

We have so many goals and desires. We want to engage in purposeful, fulfilling work. We want to have enriching relationships. We want to be healthy, financially secure and loved. We want a lot out of life, but we don’t always allow ourselves to achieve it. Frequently, I talk about why we might block ourselves from accomplishing our goals, and today I’m going to talk about how we block ourselves.

And no one wants to hear about the ways in which we get in our own ways or things we do and think to sabotage ourselves. Most people don’t like to think about our part in unpleasant experiences. We like to blame it on other people, things, past experiences. Most of us find personal accountability pretty challenging.

Speaking for myself, I can say confidently that two things are true about myself: 1) I’ve set goals and 2) I have worked really hard to resist making space for myself to achieve those goals. Most of us do it with something. It’s not conscious. We think we’re fighting our hardest and fiercest to get what we want. And we are fighting, vigorously and ferociously. We just aren’t always fighting for ourselves; we are fighting ourselves, everything we don’t want (and sometimes, everything we do want). We get too handsy with the goal don’t allow for what we want to be a part of our narratives. We want to reach our goals, but we fight them.

I’ve heard stories like this from clients and friends for many years. We want something; we go after it, but somehow we end up creating an even bigger challenge. We get frustrated. Sometimes we give up and walk away. And resistance can be so sneaky. It can totally appear to us that we are taking steps toward our goals. But, then why do we feel further away from accomplishing them than when we started?

Take this common problem: “We’re not getting along.” Ok, I get it. We’ve all been there. We’re figuring out an issue with a partner, trying to see eye-to-eye on something, effect some compromise, maybe but it just… isn’t happening. We start talking about it, disagree, fight, and someone either blows up or walks way. (Sometimes both, am I right?) And we think, “But I’m trying to talk about it. I’m trying to help us reach an understanding. Why isn’t it working?” Sometimes it’s not working because we’re not allowing for the change. We’re not making room in our relationship or our communication style to allow anything different to happen. Instead, we are suffocating the possibility for change with a closed mind and heart, forceful confrontation, and poor emotion management. This approach resists the very change we want to see.

When I first started my private practice, I knew that I needed an office to see clients, but I didn’t have any clients, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to pay my office rent. But if I never got an office, how could I see people? And I would just go around and around like that, sometimes for days at a time. Intellectually, I knew it would work out, but my fear wasn’t so sure about it. Eventually, I took the plunge and experienced the change I wanted to see. If I had never made space for this change, I probably would have given up a long time ago. Sure, there were obvious actionable steps I had to take in getting there, but first I had to allow for this thing I wanted by making space for it.

We have to make space to allow for the changes we want to take place. It’s true for any of these pretty common concerns:

“They don’t appreciate me.”

“I can’t lose weight.”

“I’ll never save enough money.”

“How long will it take until I feel better?”

“My life is one big clusterfuck.”

“I’m always so stressed out.”

If you’re finding that you feel you’ve been fighting for what you want and seeing low to no results, try this:

“As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.” -Bell Hooks

I’d like to take this time to say thank you to women and girls; everywhere, from every walk, of any and every identity and orientation, of every experience, past and present. Thank you for your fight and your love, for your contributions and your sacrifices. Here’s to you. Here’s to us. To the fed-up and the tired, the scared and the hiding, the activists, to the women and girls who still believe it’s their job to perform conventional femininity and gender in exchange for male acceptance, to the sex workers, the Queen Bitches, the nonconformists, the people-pleasers, to the women who believe that we aren’t supposed to need anything, to the women who provide and meet needs and nurture and care and allow themselves to receive, to the women who provide and meet needs and nurture and care and don’t receive or cannot allow themselves to receive, to the loud and proud, to the silent and ashamed, to the women who have complicated relationships with womanhood, the mentors, the novices, to the women who embrace their sexuality and the women who haven’t felt safe embracing their sexuality, to the women who don’t give a fuck and the women who don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, the leaders and the assistants, the loudmouths, the reserved, the comfortable and the vulnerable, to the women we’ve been and the women we’re becoming, the poets and the engineers, the emotionally unbridled and the emotionally subdued, the women fighting to survive and the women who are thriving, to the ones who have elevated themselves and the ones who are heavy with burden- thank you.

How ever you Woman, I extend to you my deepest and most profound gratitude.

We are courageous. We are stronger together. We don’t always take ownership of ourselves and our experiences; we’re growing. We fight for ourselves when we fight for any of us. We resist. We love. We fight. We create. We push. We are a pantheon of voices. We are a cauldron of gifts and strengths. We expand consciousness. We risk it. We surrender to our purpose, to our love, and to our power. We have the right. We keep going. We are here.

Thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for all the times you have done anything, said anything in support of us living the way we want to live. You provide hope and life and love and light. You are the reason I do what I do every day. You are my inspiration to keep connecting to my power and the reason I fight for others to connect to theirs. You are the reason we’re all still here. You are my favorite part of us. Thank you.

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”-Audre Lord